The chapter examines the process of state building in the territory transferred from Germany to Poland in 1945, showing that mass uprooting shored up the demand for state-provided resources and weakened resistance to governance. It exploits the placement of the interwar border between Poland and Germany to estimate the effects of postwar population transfers on the size of the state. It then examines the political legacies of population transfers in post-1989 Poland.

Vengalil Krishanan Krishna Menon established a reputation as one of the most controversial and divisive figures in Indian and broader Cold War politics. Under Nehru’s patronage, Menon experienced a meteoric rise to political power. In 1947, he was appointed to the prestigious post of Indian High Commissioner to the United Kingdom. However, his abrasive personality and readiness to listen to and, on occasions, publicly endorse, Soviet and Communist Chinese positions on a range of international questions ruffled feathers in London and Washington. In the United States, officials characterised the Indian diplomat as ‘venomous,’ ‘violently anti-American,’ and ‘an unpleasant mischief-maker’. Many British diplomats echoed such sentiments. This chapter examines the British government’s response to Krishna Menon’s appointment. It explores the nature of Menon’s relationship with the CPGB, the risk that communists working for him posed to British security, and the strategy that MI5 developed to meet it. It illustrates the Attlee government’s conviction that India, and more particularly, Krishna Menon, represented a weak link in the Commonwealth security and intelligence chain.

Spying in South Asia examines the misguided and self-defeating Cold War interventions undertaken by British and American intelligence and security agencies in post-colonial India. British and American policymakers mounted intelligence operations in the Indian subcontinent on the basis of questionable, and often conflicting assumptions: that covert action could steer Indian opinion in a pro-Western direction; that British and American intelligence agencies could be insulated from Indian antipathy for colonialism and neo-colonialism; that Western intelligence support would corrode India’s relations with the Soviet Union; that controversies surrounding American intelligence practice would not cut through with the Indian public; that the subcontinent’s politicians would not employ the CIA as a lightning rod for India’s domestic travails; and that secret intelligence activity could help to arrest a decline in British and American influence in India. Today, India’s emergence as an economic titan, renewed Sino-Indian tensions, and backwash from the ‘War on Terror’, keep the subcontinent in the global headlines.

This chapter examines Kerouac in the context of 1950s literary culture in the United States, with particular emphasis on the Cold War. The 1950s was the decade Kerouac became famous overnight with the publication of On the Road, and the decade he produced the bulk of his most significant writing, including Visions of Cody, Doctor Sax, The Subterraneans, The Dharma Bums, and Mexico City Blues, among others. This chapter explores the relationship between Kerouac’s literary production during the 1950s and the multilayered cultural imperatives of the Cold War.

This chapter answers the question ’does central Europe exist?’ by first drawing a literary-historical line between Franz Kafka and Milan Kundera, focusing particularly on the critical tensions in Kundera’s construction of a vanished culture and on the West’s mythologizing of central Europe. It then turns to two Prague-set novels, Bruce Chatwin’s Utz, which explores the condition of stubborn aesthetic individualism under communism, and Tom McCarthy’s Men in Space, set in the months following the splitting-up of Czechoslovakia in 1992. Beyond the Czech lands, the Austrian Ingeborg Bachmann’s Malina, a significant work of avant-garde feminism, offers a doomed fantasy of post-war Austro-Hungarian relationships. Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead, set in the Polish–Silesian borderlands, is a revenge thriller whose narrator is inspired by the radicalism of William Blake. These case studies signal the ways central Europe has been confabulated by British writers; they also show how an evolving canon of fiction-in-translation is appropriately pluralizing and updating the West’s idea of the ‘middle’.

The nature of modern economies, and their ideological dimensions. The cultural challenges of capitalist economies and their “socialist” alternatives.

After his conversion to socialism in 1883, William Morris expressed again and again his hope of replacing the ‘cannibalism’ and ‘stupendous organization – for the misery of life’ that characterized modern civilization with the community of liberated equals pursuing satisfying and meaningful work that he saw in socialism (CL, ii.480; CW, xxiii.279). In his own account of his political awakening to the causes and cures of poverty and inequality he described himself as a ‘practical Socialist’ with little interest in politics for politics’ sake. Indeed, he embarked on a relentless programme of propaganda and agitation for the cause: he gave speeches, founded and edited a newspaper, Commonweal, and wrote protest chants, political poems, articles and sketches as well as contributing to pamphlets and leaflets on aspects of socialism in the present and future. This chapter examines the range of Morris’s journalistic and propaganda writings and the ways they formulate and express his practical but never narrowly pragmatic socialism. His recurring emphasis on the interconnections of art, beauty, environment and communities of many kinds shapes an internationalist, revolutionary ideal of socialism founded on and arrived at through fellowship, imagination and action.

This chapter tracks Morris’s biographical involvements with Oxford across his lifetime, and examines the role of Oxford, as both city and university, in prompting the radical political commitments of his later years. On his arrival there as an undergraduate in 1853, he was deeply disillusioned with the official teaching of the university, but made a number of formative friendships which opened to him new cultural and social horizons. The intellectual influence of John Ruskin interacted with Morris’s own intense response to Oxford’s ancient architecture to propel him further in the direction of social critique. In later years, as activist for the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, Morris threw himself into campaigns to protect key Oxford sites. As a socialist activist from 1883, he regarded Oxford as an important city to capture for the cause, lecturing there on socialism no less than six times (ably assisted by his old friend Charles Faulkner, who founded the Oxford branch of the Socialist League). We can also trace links between the Bodleian Library’s holdings and Morris’s own publishing venture, the Kelmscott Press; and Oxford plays a significant role in both the local imagery and overall geography of his utopia News from Nowhere.

Victorian MPs debated whether or not the Inns of Court adequately governed the bar and effectively trained their members. The societies defended themselves from parliamentary assaults by insisting that legal etiquette ensured the gentlemanly character of the bar. This chapter examines disciplinary hearings for violations of etiquette at the Inns to consider the societies’ direct assertions of their authority over the operations of the legal profession. In the nineteenth century, breaches of legal etiquette largely pertained to ungentlemanly behavior, such as engaging in trade. In the geopolitical context of the early twentieth century, however, faced with members holding new radical political commitments, the societies overlaid concerns about gentlemanliness with worries over personal political expression and national loyalty. The societies manipulated legal etiquette to deliberately excuse or disbar members for similar offenses along lines that accorded more with members’ seeming Britishness or foreignness than with the legality or illegality of their actions.

In the decade under review, there were signs of a lessening of outside great-power interference in regional affairs. The regional-security situation and the prospects for regional stability have in this respect provided grounds for optimism, although the situation is not entirely one which traditional Australian foreign policy in the region has sought. The long-perceived threat to regional stability posed by potential communist interference has been reduced not so much because of increased Western influence but more because of initiatives by Southeast Asian countries and, more dramatically, by the implications for world and regional affairs of the moves in the Soviet Union and China towards more open societies and towards economic priorities more responsive to free market influences. Also encouraging have been the indications from 1987 that the rivalry between these two countries was ending, although the Chinese repression of the pro-democracy movement has raised doubts about China’s development along the path to reform.

This chapter examines Bernstein’s complicated relationship with the Soviet Union. Born four years before the creation of the Soviet Union and dying eleven months after the fall of the Berlin Wall, his life story, including his rise to global prominence, paralleled the history of the Soviet republics. As an American of Ukrainian heritage, the composer had personal ties to the region. I examine these family connections and their complexities; his lifelong interest in Russian classical music; his period of attraction to Communism as an ideology, its consequences, and his statements in support of US–Soviet peace; and his 1960 cultural-diplomacy-related tour of the USSR with the New York Philharmonic. Ultimately, I argue that the United States’ relationship with the USSR had a profound impact not only on his family life and conducting career, but also on his attitudes to music-stylistic choices.

This chapter seeks to explain one element of inequality in Western Europe by focusing on the treatment of immigrant communities. It focuses on how attitudes to immigrants – and conceptions of them within a broader framework of social justice – evolved. One of the ways that the ‘long 1968’ challenged European complacency was to present the cause of immigrants as a cause of social justice. By contrast, today immigrants are often depicted as antithetical to social justice. Many commentators have argued that a fundamental tension exists between ethnic diversity and social equality, and depict mass migration as undermining social justice. But where did such ‘welfare chauvinism’ originate from, and how did these ideas entrench themselves within public discourse? In other words, how did we get from social justice for immigrants to immigrants as the antithesis of social justice? A conventional answer to this question might focus on the loss of confidence of left-wing political projects towards the end of the twentieth century, and the concomitant rise of the radical right. This chapter, however, interrogates tensions within social-justice discourses of the left and centre-left, paying attention to emancipatory and exclusionary aspects, and drawing links between the ‘guest worker’ era and the present day.

In this chapter, I analyze data on over 300 individual members of the communist regimes in Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, and Romania. I explore how an abrupt post-Stalinist transition in the wake of the Soviet dictator’s death affected elite cohesion and the relationship between ruling coalitions and their coercive subordinates. Specifically, I test whether breakdowns in elite cohesion led to more punishment of coercive agency chiefs, and their more frequent removal from office. My test of this argument exploits both variation in elite cohesion across Stalinist and post-Stalinist regimes, and variation in Soviet authority over different types of coercive agents. I analyze original data on members of communist ruling coalitions to estimate survival models of their tenures. I find that the tenures of Defense Ministers and secret police chiefs were similar under Stalinist coalitions, but secret police chiefs had significantly shorter tenures than Defense Ministers under post-Stalinist coalitions.

In this chapter, I explain why the Stasi became the largest and most capable secret police force in Cold War Central and Eastern Europe. The shock of Stalin’s death did not cause a leadership transition and wholesale repudiation of Stalinism in the GDR. Instead, the ruling coalition persisted and purged their rivals after 1953. Walter Ulbricht and his fellow elites survived and persisted in their strong commitment to a harsh, Stalinist regime of repression. This persistence had profound consequences for the security apparatus, repression, and social order. The Stasi continued its growth in capacity to become an all-present repressive force. The story of elite cohesion and coercive capacity in East Germany is one of continuity and growth – unlike that of disruption, collapse, and stagnation in Poland. And as the commitment to surveillance and repression continued unabated in the GDR, the fortunes of regime opponents waned. With a few notable exceptions, dissidents and opponents were isolated and neutralized in East Germany.

In this part of the book, I move from a comparative historical analysis of Poland and East Germany in Part II to an analysis of quantitative data drawn from all the socialist dictatorships of Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland and Romania. The purpose of the following two chapters is to test whether the argument developed in Chapter 2 can travel beyond the Polish and East German cases examined above to explain variation in the turnover of coercive elites and the size of coercive institutions across the region from 1945 to 1989.